Celia Álvarez Muñoz, an El Paso native, is deeply committed to her bilingual and bicultural heritage. She plays with text, puns, and double meanings, regularly addressing such themes as cognitive development and language acquisition. Later works also incorporate photographs with wall drawings, works on paper, and sculptures. Her most recent work continues to relate to the experiences of living in the physical as well as the psychological and political border zone. Recent projects include a design collaboration with Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta and with the City of Dallas for the Latino Cultural Center/Centro Cultural de Dallas. Currently, Muñoz’s photographs are part of the invitational traveling exhibition Our Journeys/Our Stories: Portraits of Latino Achievement by the Smithsonian Institution. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has received several awards for her work, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was a participant in the 1991 Whitney Biennial.
